Russia will take Ukraine and noone will do shit to stop it, all because the US and its allies think they can tell the world what to do yet can't even pacify third world countries. Sanctions will be used en masse for a time, but Europe needs Russian oil so it won't last. And as Russia and China have already spent the last decade divorcing themselves from the US dollar; said sanctions will only reinforce that divorce. Within a few years or perhaps a couple decades they won't be hurting at all, while the US becomes more and more isolated and hurt by their own sanctions. Until the day comes that noone uses US dollars anymore because Chinese renminbi are the gold standard. Somewhere along the way the US may wake up and realize it has signed its own economic death warrant but it will be far too late. China will have fully supplanted them and become the next great empire of hypocrisy. Because all empires are hypocrites.